Kubernetes Platform Engineering Lead

Kubernetes Platform Engineering Lead Multi-tenancy, Developer Platform, Guardrails and Platform Consolidation Senior Manager / Associate Director London, hybrid £130k + Bonus, Pension and Top Tier Benefits Kubernetes Platform Engineering Lead to own and evolve a large-scale internal platform capability used by engineering teams across the business. This is not a generic DevOps role. It is a senior platform leadership mandate focused on Kubernetes architecture, multi-tenancy, developer enablement, platform guardrails, observability and consolidation of distributed platform patterns. The successful candidate will help shape how developers consume Kubernetes safely and efficiently, balancing autonomy with enterprise-grade reliability, security, auditability and operational control. WHAT YOU WILL DO Own and evolve a shared Kubernetes platform capability used by multiple engineering teams across a complex enterprise environment.Design practical multi-tenancy patterns across AWS accounts, clusters, namespaces and workload boundaries.Define platform guardrails covering RBAC, admission controls, policy-as-code, network policy, security, auditability and lifecycle management.Help consolidate distributed Kubernetes usage into a more standardised, supportable and developer-friendly platform model.Build self-service platform capabilities, golden paths and reusable patterns that reduce developer friction.Partner closely with Developer Engineering, Security, Architecture, Cloud Engineering and application teams.Own platform roadmap, standards, adoption and continuous improvement.Improve observability, tracing, platform reliability and proactive operational insight.Lead and coach platform engineers, balancing planned platform tasks with urgent production or developer priorities.Treat developers as customers: remove friction, improve usability, and make the secure path the easiest path. WHAT YOU WILL BRING Deep hands-on Kubernetes platform engineering experience, ideally including AWS EKS in enterprise-scale environments.Strong understanding of Kubernetes multi-tenancy design, including clusters vs namespaces vs virtual clusters, control-plane and data-plane isolation, and workload segmentation.Practical experience with platform guardrails such as RBAC, admission controls, Kyverno or OPA, network policies, Cilium or equivalent, quotas, secrets, audit and compliance controls.Experience designing or operating developer-facing platforms, internal developer platforms, golden paths, self-service workflows or platform-as-a-product capabilities.Strong cloud engineering background across AWS accounts, networking, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, GitOps and platform lifecycle management.Ability to work with development teams without blocking them — platform engineering should enable, not obstruct.Good leadership capability: team management, mentoring, distributed teams, pair programming, group tasks, handling silos and aligning engineers across time zones.Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical trade-offs clearly to developers, architects, security and senior stakeholders.Experience in a regulated financial services or enterprise environment is highly desirable. This is not a ticket-driven DevOps support role or a purely managerial role with light Kubernetes exposure. This is not a generic cloud transformation role. Someone who only knows Kubernetes at deployment or application-support level need not apply. We need someone who can go deep on Kubernetes platform design and still lead people, adoption and platform maturity. Categories Engineering • Platform Engineering •Cloud Infrastructure • DevOps• Site Reliability Engineering Skills Kubernetes •Amazon EKS • Platform Engineering •Internal Developer Platform• Developer Experience •Multi-Tenancy • Cloud Architecture •Infrastructure as Code • Terraform• GitOps •ArgoCD • Kyverno• OPA • Cilium •Network Policies • RBAC • Admission Controls •Observability • Prometheus• Grafana •SRE • DevSecOps• AWS •Engineering Leadership